The Voucher Deal: Better Than Nothing, Worse Than It Ought to Be

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On the eve of the Legislature’s veto override session, we now have the text of the bill extending the motel voucher program. It’s more or less what we thought it would be; its biggest shortcoming is the exclusion of the hundreds of Vermonters unsheltered this month. Ain’t a damn thing in it for them. And as we saw earlier, these may not be the neediest of our neediest, but they’ve got some pretty extreme needs and they’re going to suffer greatly as long as they’re unhoused.

The real sin of it all is that it wouldn’t cost much to include them, and we’ve got the money. Our fiscal experts continue to forecast revenue declines in the future, but for now we’re still collecting more than predicted every month. And the FY2024 budget puts $14 million in cold storage against future federal match opportunities. That seems like prudence except that we always find money for federal matches! Wait, let me put a little stank on that:

We. Always. Find. Money. For. Federal. Matches!

Missing out on federal largesse because we couldn’t come up with the scratch? It’s just not a thing that happens.

Banking funds against that highly unlikely occurrence while we’re sentencing hundreds to indefinite unsheltering? That’s a goddamn crime.

But this deal is almost certain to go through. It gives the House dissidents most of what they asked for, and they’re likely to give in and support the override of Gov. Phil Scott’s budget veto. Well, most of them will. The rest, in the world of legislative dealmaking, don’t matter. Nor do the unhoused who aren’t being helped.

So let’s take a closer look at the bill, including a few unexpected and unwelcome twists.

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When They Start Making Deals, Remember the Lives of Real People Are at Stake

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The Legislature’s veto override session convenes tomorrow. Multiple override attempts are likely, but the biggest deal is the FY2024 budget. With some Democrats and Progressives on record saying they won’t support a budget override without funding for the motel voucher program, leadership is putting together a plan to bring the dissidents back on board.

And in the process, rescue some actual living humans from the scrap heap we’ve consigned them to.

As best we know it, leadership’s plan would allow extended motel stays for the roughly 2,000 Vermonters scheduled to be unhoused in July. But it offers nothing to the hundreds who’ve already been evicted from motels — some on June 1, some last Friday.

These are people who can supposedly get by without state-funded shelter. But when you look at their circumstances, you realize two things: (1) These people are in desperate situations, often through no fault of their own, and (2) they have hopes, dreams, intelligence, and insights. They have value. They should not be discarded simply because it’s too hard to help them. When, in fact, it’s not too hard. Not at all.

The reality of the people we have chosen not to help has been chronicled by, you guessed it, housing advocate and 2022 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brenda Siegel. She’s done the hard work of speaking with the folks we have abandoned, something the state hasn’t bothered to do. I’ll attach her findings to this post, and go over some key points after the jump.

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Governor Nice Guy Fears That Undeserving Students WIll Get a Free Meal

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In allowing a universal school meals bill to become law without his signature, Gov. Phil Scott adopted an interesting philosophical position. Take it away, VTDigger:

He noted that the program will fund free meals for even wealthy students. 

“That’s not progressive education funding policy, it’s regressive policy that hurts the very families we are trying to help,” he said. 

Oh yes, heaven forbid that an undeserving child should receive a free lunch. That would be an abuse of the public purse and — follow closely here, things get a little thick — a punishment on the kids who really need a handout.

As the kids used to say, “lolwut?”

This is another case where the governor can’t say the quiet part out loud — that he doesn’t want to provide free school meals despite their proven benefits — but he still has to register his disapproval, so he comes up with transparently phony arguments like “free lunches hurt poor kids” and “a veto fight would distract me from my neverending fight for better schools.” As if we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

I wouldn’t mind if he were in the least bit consistent in this position. But he’s not. In fact, this is the only issue where he argues that a non-means-tested government benefit is a bad thing.

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They Said It Couldn’t Be Done. Seriously. Over and Over. Guess It Was All Bullshit. (Updated)

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I don’t know exactly what changed their minds, but after months of insisting the motel voucher program was going to end on schedule come Hell or high water, leaders of the House and Senate are working on a deal to extend the program.

My reactions are all over the place. Wow. Finally. Thank goodness. What took you so long?

And… let’s not get carried away until we see the fine print.

Here’s what we know, courtesy of VTDigger’s Lola Duffort. The extension would apply to roughly 2,000 people scheduled to be unhoused in July. It’s an indefinite stay, meant to allow people to stay in motels until state officials can identify “alternate stable setting[s].” There will be a mandate for the Scott administration to regularly update lawmakers, which is embarrassing for Team Scott but utterly necessary due to its complete failure to plan any sort of transition before now.

And it will not apply to anyone unhoused on June 1. So, not only are those people SOL, it also means there will be another mass eviction on Thursday Friday. You may recall that hundreds of June 1 evictees were offered free two-week extensions by some motel owners. Those extensions expire tomorrow Friday. No reprieves on offer for those folks.

I don’t know why leadership is so firm on excluding the June 1 and June 16 unhoused, who number approximately 800. I guess that’s an acceptable level of human suffering.

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Rutland is Offering the Unhoused Bus Tickets Out of Town

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The city of Rutland is home to a number of, shall we say, budget accommodations. That’s why Rutland has more motel voucher clients than any other Vermont community… and why it has a big problem on its hands with the end of the voucher program.

According to state data cited by VTDigger, nearly 500 households in the voucher program were located in Rutland. Roughly 200 were evicted on June 1; the remainder will be on the streets as of July 1 or July 29. It’s not too great a surprise, then, that part of the city’s plan for dealing with the outflux is to encourage the newly unhoused to leave town. This is part three of the city’s four-part plan for the June 1 cohort, but the same ideas will be in place for future evictees:

Yep, the answer is to ship ’em out of town. This is nothing new; communities across the country have actively sought to export their unhoused. And I understand Rutland’s position; the state took advantage of its cheap lodging supply and isn’t offering any help in dealing with the consequences. But still. This is not going to help people, it’s just going to shuffle them around.

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Blunt Force Triage

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In situations of dire emergency, triage helps guide the use of available resources. When there are no other options, it’s a logical way for those resources to have maximum impact. A battlefield, a weather incident, a disaster of any sort.

But when resources are available or the situation is predictable, triage is not appropriate. And that’s the situation we’ve got with The Great Unhousing. Vermont doesn’t have to end the motel voucher program and throw thousands of people out on the street. We don’t have to create the worst homelessness crisis in living memory.

And yet our official policy, both executive and legislative, is to ignore easily affordable and comprehensive solutions in favor of triaging the unhoused — providing shelter for those with extreme risk factors and leaving the rest to go hang.

In this situation, triage is not only unnecessary. It’s inhumane.

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That $12.5 Million is Going to Vanish Like an Ice Cube on the Face of the Sun (Clarification Added)

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Note: Several hours after this post went live, I got a complaint from someone in Mayor Weinberger’s office that I had mischaracterized his proposal. After multiple text exchanges, I got some additional clarity on his plan. I’ve tried to accurately reflect it with notations to the original post. Newly added text is in bold type.

However, the thrust of the piece is unchanged. Weinberger’s plan would provide for the most at-risk of the unhoused, but not nearly for all of them. Also, it must be said that while Weinberger’s plan would mitigate the worst effects of The Great Unhousing in Chittenden County, I’ve never heard him lobbying for a broader solution. He has not called on the governor or Legislature to restore the voucher program while alternative housing can be brought online. He is one more political leader who’s trying to limit the damage rather than address the whole problem.

Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger has come out with a plan to deal with most of Chittenden County’s share of The Great Unhousing. His proposal is to create a 50-bed shelter and a day shelter with space for 75 in an empty state office building, and extend motel voucher eligibility for 318 people due to be evicted at the end of July until alternative housing can be found for them. 165 households with significant risk factors including families with minor children, adults with disabilities receiving home health and/or hospice services, seniors (60 years+), and pregnant households.

Left off his list: Anyone already evicted on June 1 (almost 200 people in Chittenden County) or about to be evicted on the first of July.

This would include some households that were evicted on June 1 and others due to lose their motel accommodations on July 1 or July 28. But it would far from cover all of those being evicted; the total in Chittenden County, according to Weinberger’s proposal, is 354 households encompassing 512 individuals.

Even so, the estimated price tag for the office building conversion and the extended motel stays is somewhere around $4 million, per VTDigger. The source for that money, if state officials accept Weinberger’s plan? The $12.5 million allocated by the Legislature to make the end of the voucher program slightly less catastrophic.

Perhaps you can see the problem here. If the state says yes, it will have committed one-third of the statewide total for Burlington alone. For a partial solution to Chittenden County’s share of The Great Unhousing.

And according to VTDigger, Weinberger’s is one of 44 proposals submitted to the state on June 1 alone — the first day the state was accepting proposals.

Forty-four.

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The PIT Report Casts a Harsh Light on Our Political Betters

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Well, this explains a lot.

The 2023 Vermont Point-in-Time Report of Those Experiencing Homelessness is out, and it shows an explosion in homelessness over the last four years, including an 18.5% increase from last year — and a 36% hike from 2022 in unhoused families with children.

The latter figure is bitterly ironic considering the Democratic Legislature’s laser focus on helping children this session. Too bad that while they were funding child care programs and universal school meals, they couldn’t be bothered to keep roofs over unhoused children’s heads. (They could still reverse course during the upcoming veto session, which would be nice.)

The PIT Report also makes the Scott administration look even worse, which is quite the accomplishment. The numbers make clear that homelessness was exploding even as Scott was bound and determined to kill the motel voucher program that provides shelter for 80% of Vermont’s unhoused. Well, it did until last week, when the state evicted some 700 voucher clients.

The numbers also shine an unforgiving light on the administration’s failure to make any transition plan whatsoever for ending the voucher program humanely. They had to know this was happening, and yet they did nothing. It was “a crisis outrunning the state’s response,” in the words of Dartmouth College policy fellow Anne Sosin, who spent the 2023 legislative session desperately trying to get state officials and lawmakers to acknowledge the obvious.

The continuing rise in homelessness also belies Scott’s argument that the program was a response to Covid-19 and now that the pandemic is “over,” the program has to end. Problem is, even as the pandemic was waning, homelessness kept on rising dramatically. The real problem was a massive imbalance in real estate markets. There was never a policy adjustment to that change in reality.

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As Phil Scott Prepares to Launch His Paid Leave Program, Chris Sununu’s Is Off to a Rocky Start

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It went unnoticed at the time because our media was dominated by stories of the newly-unhoused being evicted from state-paid motel rooms, but last Thursday Gov. Phil Scott announced what he called “continued progress” toward his voluntary paid family leave program.

You remember that, don’t you? It’s the plan he and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu came up with in 2019 as an alternative to universal paid leave plans. It was supposed to be a joint effort, but that quickly unraveled. Instead, each governor set out to establish equivalent programs in their respective states.

Phase 1 of Scott’s plan takes effect on July 1, ironically enough on the next scheduled mass eviction event. On that day, Vermont state employees will be enrolled in a paid leave plan that will offer up to six weeks of leave at 60% of an employee’s average weekly wage for new parents or those dealing with urgent family situations. The state workforce will then serve as a base for a voluntary program to be offered to Vermont employers in July of next year.

Sununu’s plan took effect last year for New Hampshire state employees. The second phase was announced last summer with a $1.9 million state-funded “publicity blitz.” December 1, 2022 was the date that private employers could start enrolling.

And although Sununu officials are furiously lipsticking that pig, the program is, in fact, off to an unimpressive start. So unimpressive that it casts serious doubt on the prospects for Scott’s program.

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Nothing New Under the Sun

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In case you thought the unhousing of Vermonters from a motel shelter program was a new thing, VTDigger comes along with a history lesson that manages to deepen my anger at and understanding of our current situation. It seems that we went through the exact same thing only 10 years ago.

And apparently we didn’t learn a damn thing, because we’re doing it again.

The circumstances were different, but the outcome was the same. Funding for an emergency motel voucher program was cut, and a large cohort was suddenly tossed out on the street. Some were given tents and sleeping bags in lieu of actual shelter.

One big difference between now and then: The Democrats ran the roost. They held the governorship as well as the Legislature, and they still managed to screw our most vulnerable. That sheds some light on the capacity of today’s Democratic leaders to defund the program and accept the consequences. They’ve done it before, so why not now?

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